The June deportation

On the night of Friday 13 to Saturday 14 June 1941, at around one or two in the morning, lorries drew up outside houses in the towns and villages of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Four-man squads made up of NKVD and NKGB officers, soldiers of the convoy troops and local communists and activists woke the families, read out a decision on their “resettlement” or arrest, searched their homes and gave them a few dozen minutes to pack. Trains of goods wagons were waiting at the railway stations. By morning thousands of people had been detained in the three republics, which the Soviet Union had annexed less than a year earlier, and the round-up went on for several more days. It was the best-known episode of a wider operation that the Soviet security apparatus carried out between 22 May and 20 June 1941 in all the lands it had seized in 1939–1940: the former eastern provinces of Poland, the Baltic states, Bessarabia and northern Bukovina. Eight days after it ended, Germany attacked the USSR.

Popular war chronologies record the deportations under two separate days. Under 13 June they state that the Soviets began deporting Lithuanians to Siberia, that the deportations lasted five days and took 35,000 people, 7,000 of them Jews. Under 14 June they list 10,100 deportees from Estonia, 15,000 from Latvia and 34,000 (or 35,000, counting from the previous day) from Lithuania. Both dates in fact refer to a single operation, which began in all three countries on the same night. The dates need only to be made more precise: the operation began on the night of 13–14 June, so both are in a sense correct, and in Lithuania arrests and the delivery of people to the trains continued until 18 June. The Estonian and Latvian figures match the findings of present-day historians. The Lithuanian figure, however, is inflated, and the two versions in circulation contradict each other. Older studies, written without access to the Soviet archives, gave 30,000–35,000 deportees from Lithuania, but an NKVD report of 19 June 1941 lists 17,485 people, and Lithuania’s Genocide and Resistance Research Centre has established the fate of more than 16,000 by name. Today it is accepted that about 17,500 people were deported from Lithuania and more than 40,000 from the three Baltic states together. The figure of 7,000 Jews likewise comes from older estimates; archival research points to a much smaller, though still high, number.

A year of the first occupation

The Baltic states had fallen into the Soviet sphere of influence under the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. In June 1940, after a series of ultimatums, the Red Army occupied Lithuania, and two days later Latvia and Estonia. After single-list elections the new assemblies asked to be admitted to the USSR, and in August 1940 the Supreme Soviet incorporated the three states as union republics. Their leaders were deported at once: the Latvian president Kārlis Ulmanis in July 1940 and, in the same month, the Estonian president Konstantin Päts and General Johan Laidoner. The Lithuanian president, Antanas Smetona, managed to escape to Germany.

Over the following year the new authorities nationalised land, banks, businesses and houses, dissolved parties, social organisations and associations, replaced the national currencies with the rouble and opened a campaign against the Church. The security apparatus arrested thousands of “enemies of the people” and at the same time compiled card indexes of those whom, because of their past, social origin or convictions, it regarded as an “anti-Soviet element”. In Lithuania the NKVD reckoned that some 320,000 people ought to be on such a register, roughly one inhabitant in seven. The methods had been tested before. In the Polish lands seized in September 1939 and incorporated into the USSR the NKVD had already carried out three mass deportations: on 10 February 1940 it deported the families of military settlers, foresters and officials; in April 1940, in parallel with the Katyn massacre, the families of prisoners of war and of those under arrest; and in June 1940 mainly refugees from western and central Poland.

The decision of 14 May

The basis for the spring operation was a strictly secret joint resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, No. 1299-526ss of 14 May 1941, on the “removal of the socially alien element” from the Baltic republics, Western Ukraine, Western Belorussia and Moldavia. The decision was taken at the will of Joseph Stalin, and its execution fell to the security services: the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs, Lavrentiy Beria, and the People’s Commissariat for State Security, split off from the NKVD in February 1941 and headed by Vsevolod Merkulov. In the Baltic states the operation was coordinated by Merkulov’s deputy Ivan Serov and Beria’s deputy Viktor Abakumov, and in each republic by a local “troika” made up of the people’s commissars for state security and for internal affairs and the first secretary of the party.

The resolution listed the categories of people to be removed. They were members of pre-war parties and organisations deemed “counter-revolutionary” and nationalist; former army officers, policemen, gendarmes and prison guards; senior officials, landowners, industrialists and merchants; people who had fled from abroad or kept up contacts abroad; and the families of all these people, as well as the families of those arrested earlier or in hiding. To them were added criminals and registered prostitutes, whose presence in the same resolution shows how the authorities regarded the rest of the deportees. The men, the “heads of families”, were to be arrested and sent to labour camps, where their cases would later be considered by the NKVD Special Council. Women, children and the elderly were to be sent into exile in remote regions of the USSR for twenty years, which in practice meant exile without end. All of this was done without trial and without individual charges.

The procedure for the operation was described in a document known as the Serov Instructions. The document is undated, and the literature sometimes confuses it with NKVD Order No. 001223 of 11 October 1939, which concerned the registration of the “anti-Soviet element”. Since Serov signed it as deputy people’s commissar for state security, an office created only on 3 February 1941, the instructions must have been written in the spring of 1941; a copy found in Šiauliai bears a receipt stamp dated 7 June. They ordered the squads to act “without noise and panic”, at night and as quickly as possible. A family could take up to 100 kilograms of luggage: clothing, bedding, crockery and a month’s food. The men were to be separated from their families only at the station, on some pretext, so as to avoid resistance and scenes of despair.

The night of 13–14 June

The preparations were made in secret, but they could not be hidden entirely. In the towns people saw trains of goods wagons being brought into sidings; at noon on 13 June offices and businesses were ordered to place their cars at the disposal of the militia, and in the evening the operational squads assembled at designated points. NKVD officers and troops were brought into the Baltic states from Russia, Belorussia and Ukraine. In Estonia some 490 wagons were made ready at the stations in Tallinn, Haapsalu, Narva, Tartu and other towns.

The operation began simultaneously across all three countries. People were dragged from their beds, the decision was read to them, their homes were searched and they were taken by lorry to the stations. The wagons were marked with letters: arrested men were loaded into some, women and children into others. In Lithuania trains from all over the country were assembled at Nowa Wilejka (Naujoji Vilnia) near Wilno (Vilnius); there the men, on the pretext of an additional check or interrogation, were separated from their families and moved to trains bound for the camps. For most of the wives and children it was the last time they saw their husbands and fathers.

The testimony of survivors agrees that the milder provisions of the instructions remained on paper. Many families were not allowed to pack, whoever happened to be at home was taken, and the belongings left behind in flats and farms were plundered, although the instructions provided for them to be inventoried and sold for the owners’ benefit. The wagons, into which several dozen people were crammed, had plank bunks, a hole in the floor instead of a lavatory and a small barred window.

The lists show who was deported. They included pre-war ministers, members of parliament, army officers, judges, policemen and officials, teachers, clergy, activists of paramilitary organisations such as the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union or the Estonian Kaitseliit (Defence League), well-to-do farmers, merchants and businessmen, and with them their wives, children and parents. In Estonia children and young people up to the age of 17 made up more than a third of the deportees, and among those taken were infants and bedridden old people. That same night officers of the Red Army’s territorial corps, formed from the former Baltic armies, were arrested: more than two hundred servicemen were detained at the Estonian summer camp at Värska, and similar arrests were made at the Latvian camp at Litene.

How many were deported

The figures for the three countries differ depending on whether only the exiles are counted or the arrested as well, and on the date for which a tally was drawn up. The report that Merkulov sent on 17 June 1941 to Stalin, Beria and Vyacheslav Molotov gave more than 9,100 people for Estonia, of whom about 3,200 had been arrested and just under 6,000 exiled. Estonian historians, who after the war and after 1991 reconstructed the fates of the deportees by name, speak of just over 10,000 people. In Latvia, according to the findings of the Latvian State Archives, more than 15,400 people were detained and deported, about 6,200 of whom were arrested (some only in exile, as members of the families of the condemned). From Lithuania, as already noted, about 17,500 people were deported; because on 16 June the NKVD found that it was about 1,400 people short of its lists, over the next two days it hastily seized about 2,000 more to fill the quota. In all, then, more than 40,000 people were deported from the three Baltic states within a few days, from over half a per cent to roughly one per cent of the population of each.

Among those deported from Lithuania were Polish citizens. Wilno and the surrounding region had belonged since October 1939 to Lithuania, which had received them from the USSR under the mutual assistance pact, and since August 1940 to the Lithuanian SSR. In June 1941 Polish officials, army officers, policemen, landowners and activists and their families were deported from Wilno, Nowa Wilejka, Święciany (Švenčionys) and the surrounding villages, as were war refugees from central and western Poland who had found shelter in Lithuania in the autumn of 1939. For the Poles of the Wilno region it was the first mass deportation, since the three deportations of 1940, carried out in the lands incorporated directly into the Byelorussian and Ukrainian SSRs, had passed them by.

From Lwów to Kishinev

The Baltic deportation was only part of the whole operation. In the Polish lands, which the NKVD treated as Western Ukraine and Western Belorussia, the fourth and last of the mass deportations of 1939–1941 was carried out at this time. On 22 May 1941, according to NKVD documents, about 11,000 people were deported from the provinces of Lwów, Stanisławów, Tarnopol and Volhynia, mainly the families of members and supporters of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists who had been arrested or were in hiding. On 19–20 June, two days before the outbreak of war, it was the turn of the Białystok and Grodno regions and of the former provinces of Nowogródek, Polesie and Wilno that lay within the Byelorussian SSR, from which, according to the same documents, 22,000–24,000 people were deported: members of the intelligentsia, the families of railwaymen, of those under arrest and of “settlers”, and the refugees who still remained there. Some transports from the Białystok region, overtaken by the German attack, were stranded at stations or came under bombing. For decades Polish historiography estimated this fourth deportation at 200,000–300,000 people; NKVD documents, available since the 1990s, speak of several tens of thousands, and Polish studies based on them give a figure of more than 85,000 people for the whole May–June operation, including the Baltic republics. The dispute over how complete these documents are has not been settled.

In the south the same resolution of 14 May was carried out on the night of 12–13 June in the Moldavian SSR and in the Chernivtsi and Izmail oblasts of the Ukrainian SSR, created out of Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, which Romania had been forced to cede in the summer of 1940 after a Soviet ultimatum. According to NKVD documents almost 30,000 people were deported from there – Moldavians and Romanians, Ukrainians, Russians, Jews, Bulgarians and Gagauz – in proportions close to the make-up of the population. Older Romanian estimates, which spoke of hundreds of thousands, lumped the deportations together with arrests and forced recruitment for labour in the Soviet interior. On the basis of Soviet documents the whole operation of 22 May – 20 June 1941 is estimated at about a hundred thousand deportees.

Jews among the deportees

Thousands of Jews were also deported from the Baltic states, and in a proportion higher than their share of the population. In Latvia, according to Latvian archival research, they made up almost 12 per cent of the deportees, or about 1,800 people; more than 400 Jews were deported from Estonia, roughly one in ten members of the country’s small Jewish community. The figure of 7,000 often given for Lithuania comes from older estimates; research based on Soviet documents speaks of about 1,700–2,000 Jews among those deported from Lithuania, roughly a tenth of the total. They included businessmen and merchants, property owners, Zionist activists and members of Jewish social organisations – precisely those whom the Soviet authorities counted as the “bourgeois and nationalist element”.

This fact matters for what happened in the weeks that followed. Soon after the Germans arrived, some Lithuanian and Latvian nationalists, followed by German propaganda, portrayed the Soviet terror, above all the deportations, as the work of the Jews and laid the blame for it on the whole Jewish community. This was the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, contradicted both by the lists of deportees and by the fact that Jews were numerous among the NKVD’s victims. Many Jewish exiles survived the war precisely because they had ended up in Siberia, while their relatives who had stayed at home perished in the Holocaust.

The road east

The trains carrying the deportees set off from 17 June onwards. The Estonian trains left via Narva and Izborsk; the Lithuanian ones, seventeen in all, departed from Nowa Wilejka on 19 June and reached their destinations between 30 June and 9 July. When the war began on 22 June most of them were still on the move, and the first deaths, especially of children and the elderly, were already occurring along the way.

The wagons carrying the men were sent to the camps of the Gulag: Lithuanians mainly to camps in Krasnoyarsk Krai and the northern Urals, Latvians to camps in the Kirov and Molotov oblasts and to Norilsk, and Estonians first to camps in eastern Ukraine, which were soon evacuated because of the war, and then to the Urals. There, usually after a few months, the NKVD Special Council or tribunals passed sentences, often of death. The women, children and old people were settled in special settlements, on collective farms and at forestry enterprises in Altai and Krasnoyarsk Krai, in the Novosibirsk, Omsk and Tomsk oblasts, in the Komi Republic and in northern Kazakhstan. They worked at felling and floating timber and in the fields, on starvation rations, with no right to leave their place of exile. In the summer of 1942 some of the Lithuanians and other exiles from Altai were moved still further, to the lower Lena and the coast of the Laptev Sea, where they spent their first polar winter in dugouts and makeshift huts.

Mortality was enormous, though it is reckoned in different ways. It struck the men in the camps hardest. Of the roughly 3,500 Estonians sent straight to the camps, according to Estonian research, only a few hundred were still alive in the spring of 1942; many were shot, and most died of hunger, cold and exhaustion in the first winter. In all, according to the same research, about 6,000 of the more than 10,000 people deported from Estonia perished. Latvian historians have counted at least 4,900 dead and executed, close to 40 per cent of the deportees, including more than 690 people who were shot. Among those deported from Lithuania in 1941, according to estimates by the Lithuanian historian Arvydas Anušauskas, about 8,000 died. In exile it was above all children and old people who died.

Its place in the war

The June deportation ended a week before Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union, which Hitler had already planned in December 1940 in Directive No. 21. Soviet propaganda, and some later literature after it, explained the deportations by the need to secure the rear before the war. The categories of deportees, the lists drawn up since the autumn of 1940 and the fact that women, children and old people were taken show, however, that the aim went further: to remove from the newly seized lands entire social strata that could have formed the nucleus of resistance and carried the memory of an independent state. The effect was the opposite of the one intended. When the German offensive began on 22 June, an anti-Soviet uprising broke out in Lithuania, partisans took up arms in Latvia and Estonia, and many inhabitants greeted the Wehrmacht as liberators. The retreating NKVD murdered its prisoners, and within a few weeks the Germans and local collaborators, exploiting hatred of the Soviet occupier and the myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, began the extermination of the Baltic Jews.

For the Polish citizens deported in 1940 and 1941 the war brought an unexpected change after a few weeks. The agreement concluded on 30 July 1941 by General Władysław Sikorski with the Soviet ambassador in London restored diplomatic relations, and the “amnesty” announced in August allowed many exiles and prisoners to reach the Polish army being formed in the USSR, with which some of them left the Soviet Union in 1942. The Baltic exiles had no such way out. After the Red Army returned in 1944–1945 the deportations from Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia resumed, and the largest of them, in March 1949, took more than 90,000 people. The exiles of 1941 were allowed to return only after Stalin’s death, mainly in 1956–1958, and often not to their own homes.

For half a century the June night of 1941 could not be spoken of in public. When in 1987, on the anniversary, Latvian activists of the Helsinki-86 group laid flowers at the Freedom Monument in Riga, it was one of the first public acts of the Baltic national awakening. Today 14 June is a day of remembrance in all three countries: in Lithuania as the Day of Mourning and Hope (PL), in Latvia as the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Communist Genocide, and in Estonia as the Day of Mourning, with flags flown at half-mast. In Poland the memory of all four deportations of 1940–1941 is joined in the World Day of Siberian Deportees (PL), observed on 17 September, the anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland.